Compliance vs. Resilence (to Incoherence)

I know the civilizing process / civilized systems select for both…but are they really the same thing? Are they both forms of attenuation (of feedback sensitivity)?

Compliance is the willingness / tendency to conform to external demands, rules, or expectations (regardless of your internal state or of the environmental logic). It’s a behavioral adaptation. Your behavior becomes externally guided, socially enforced. You’re rewarded for obedience, predictability, and following rules. The more compliant you are, the better you’ll function in hierarchal or symbolic systems. But this adaptation (necessarily) suppresses agency, spontaneity, and moral resistance. I think of compliance as a way to survive within incoherence, by submitting to its logic…even when it contradicts reality.

Resilience to incoherence is a bit different. I see it as the ability to tolerate cognitive dissonance, sensory overwhelm, moral contradiction, or systemic absurdity (without breaking down). Unlike compliance, this is a cognitive/emotional adaptation that’s internalized over time. You get rewarded for emotional detachment (“thick skin”), optimism, and stability. This adaptation enables prolonged function under conditions that would distress a more sensitive person. But the the adaptation (becoming resilient) suppresses emotional fidelity, sensory reactivity, and ethical boundaries. Think of it as the dampening of error signals…it allows the dysfunctional systems you participate in to keep running even when they no longer map to reality.

They both suggest selection for high attenuation (reduced capacity to detect, register, and act on biologically meaningful feedback). That includes sensory attenuation (tolerating noise, crowds), emotional attenuation (suppressing distress, grief, anger, empathy), moral attenuation (compromising truth for harmony or success), and relational attenuation (roleplay instead of reciprocity).

So I see attenuation as being the core functional trait being selected for in civilization. Not intelligence, strength, or adaptability, but attenuation…especially in domains that would otherwise threaten systemic continuity. That’s the falsifiable hypothesis I’m running with. That civilization (as both a process and a system) is runaway selection for attenuation.

But attenuation is relative, isn’t it? I can’t say something is “attenuated” without specifying what signal or input has been diminished, and relative to what baseline/context.

So in the context of domestication/civilization…what signals are being attenuated (and compared to what prior or natural baseline)? I listed some above and I keep adding more.

Again, it’s not that “civilized” or “neurotypical” people are less capable in general. But we need to acknowledge that they’ve been conditioned (or selected) to attenuate very specific categories of feedback (categories that threaten the coherence of symbolic, hierarchal, or artificial systems they depend on). It isn’t hard to see when you think of how and why we domesticate animals…attenuation is the system’s way of silencing disruptive signals (and only “adaptive” in relation to a system in which truth is inconvenient).